I used to raid pretty hardcore, 4 - 5 times a week in World 100-200 guilds before MoP.

I have to say eventually I burnt out hard. Dragon Soul was the worst, because there were the endless LFR runs with alts etc... I hated the instance when we'd barely started progressing. The mood in the guild was going down, too, some wanted even more in terms of world rank and overall it wasn't fun anymore. I was sort of relieved when we disbanded. It was pretty cut-throat by the end, I didn't like it anymore.

Took a break from WOW after that for SWTOR and eventually came back as a casual. I'd love to raid without pressure, just clearing normal 1 or 2 days a week, but you can barely find that. Back in the day we would clear normalmode on the first day of release, but I can't seem to find that. That's all I'd like, a casual guild that raids 1 or 2 days a week and clears normalmode. Sure, some hardmodes would be great but only what you can work on in 2 days per week without requiring attendance.
I'm fine with signing up in the WOW calendar, but I don't want to have to decline when someone calls me up on a Thursday to go out on Saturday. We didn't raid on Saturday back in the day, but whenever someone would call more or less spontaneously I'd have to decline because of the raiding schedule.

I really like having more flexibility in my life and not having to plan everything around the raiding schedule.

But there don't seem to be any casual guilds with lax attendance requirements that clear normal/start on some heroics without too much pressure. My current guild is very casual and normalmodes are suddenly hard which I find ridiculous. But I don't want a big time commitment, so what can you do...

Gotta say I lost touch with everyone from the pre-raiding days when I was a beginner/casual way back in Burning Crusade. Server transfers would do that to you - when you want to raid harcore, you have to transfer eventually (most likely). We also didn't have much in common anymore. But you do meet new people, make new friends and I'm still playing with a bunch of them who also quit hardcore raiding.

We are all more casual now, doing other stuff like leveling alts or PVP. It's good to be on your own time.

I see a lot of blame on Blizzard, or the MoP - Cata expansions, but I think it's something totally different. I think it is the way people look at video games for the last 10 years or so. I know that's before WoW but WoW is not my point here. There was a generation of early games (atari comps, comm64s, NES, etc.) that took a little pride in beating a difficult challenge.. sure cheat codes existed back then (who could forget the famous contra one) But I knew people back then that even with codes available tried to do things the hard way or excluded cheat codes all together - my guess is the ones im speaking of are at least in their 30s (age). But somewhere along the video game progression line, cheating became "the norm" - to the extent of gamers actually not understand why you want to do it the hardway. Now, don't get me wrong we still have some that come along even now - that are about a challenge - but it seems less and less that is the attitude to video games in general.

And I believe as that generation of I want shit easy and have some fun with this game - not get all serious-like with it to beat it on super-impossible-fuck-my-ass hard mode, are graduating to mmos and the king of mmos is WoW. So, people can have fun in wow w/o raiding, and maybe you make a friend and ask that friend hey do you do LFR? and your friend says sure I do - I luv raiding... And you think to yourself "Hmm, he might make a good normal mode raider for our guild". You invite he comes along on a progression night and wipes for a few hours (maybe not even getting to experience that we got a hard boss down finally feeling). He whispers you later going "Dam man, that was not raiding - that was terrible whatever that was and no fun.. I'll pass on this kind of raiding." /gquit.

I don't know if im over-analyzing or what.. but I simply believe that less and less poeple want any sort of challenge when video gaming (or possibly in every aspect of life). They are out there though...new ones still show up - just far and few in between.

You are sort of right though in one sense, after having raided in guilds that can clear higher-end heroics, I can confidently say at this point I am never going to ever raid in a guild that considers normals "progression" of any sort, I'd sooner just retire from raiding and only do LFR, or simply quit the game altogether.

That's part of my issue with the game; having heroic mode fights be every fight in the raid totally invalidated normal mode. Normal mode SHOULD be progression, not a stepping stone to the "real" fight (that's what LFR should be for) or a way to tell bad guilds from good guilds (e.g. have you cleared normal mode = good at minimum, still working on normal = bad). The Ulduar-style hard modes were great because they didn't invalidate the normal mode but added in additional perks for doing it on a harder difficulty; that's what it should be so your good/top guilds have all the hard achievements, while your normal guild IS doing progression by clearing normal modes.

In this day and age you basically find a guild that can do at least some hard modes without nerfs, or you're just bad.

Around here, you can always tell who's opinion isn't well thought out. They're usually the ones making sweeping generalizations about other players.

I'm tempted to say it's yours, or that you simply don't raid. Increasingly there's no middle ground in raiding these days. Either you're in a mediocre guild with loads of pretty shitty raiders, or you're in a super hardcore guild which turns it into a second job. Back in TBC for example, pretty much every server had the 1-3 really good guilds, a load of decent ones, and then the mediocre/bad ones. Nowadays, it seems most servers have 1 really good guild, 1-3 decent guilds (If you're lucky) and then the mediocre/bad ones. But far less of them. All of them.

This is increasingly stratifying the raiding community, and leads exactly to what he said. Either you're hardcore or you're bad.

I'm tempted to say it's yours, or that you simply don't raid. Increasingly there's no middle ground in raiding these days. Either you're in a mediocre guild with loads of pretty shitty raiders, or you're in a super hardcore guild which turns it into a second job. Back in TBC for example, pretty much every server had the 1-3 really good guilds, a load of decent ones, and then the mediocre/bad ones. Nowadays, it seems most servers have 1 really good guild, 1-3 decent guilds (If you're lucky) and then the mediocre/bad ones. But far less of them. All of them.

This is increasingly stratifying the raiding community, and leads exactly to what he said. Either you're hardcore or you're bad.

Exactly. Clearing normal mode used to mean you were at least above-average; now the opinion (which as always is taken to the extreme on forums and especially here where there are a lot of Top 50 and better raiders that post) is that normal modes don't matter at all and heroic modes are what counts, so a guild that cleared normal modes and can't do heroic modes is average at best and probably below-average as the new "average" is a handful of bosses in heroic mode. That's not right. This is the problem I have with there being a full "heroic" mode of an entire raid as opposed to making the fight harder by doing something differently (kill order on a council fight, for example) so that normal mode still matters but the "hardcore" raiders can do the fight in the special hard mode as their reward for being better than most. We don't have that anymore. There's easy (LFR), normal (Normal) and hard (Heroic) but easy is TOO easy (the attacks should do a lot less damage to train you, but you shouldn't be able to ignore them completely like you can in many situations), normal is usually too hard for the average people, and heroic is now the only content that matters in the mind of the community.

From classic to end of Wrath, I only joined guilds that raided once a week for 2-3 hours. With my guilds I usually did the second tiers of raiding up until ToC/ICC were faceroll in Wrath. For 2nd and 3rd nights I was pulled in by guilds in AQ40 (not Naxx, no) and T6 raids as "that guy on server" a lot, so I was pretty happy to know I was part of a community.

In Cata, I joined a *gasp* two nights a week guild that raided 4-5 hours total. We did most everything but the end bosses on heroics, which was relatively disappointing from that perspective, but I could live. In Mists now, I'm still with that guild, and we didn't do H Sha of Fear, but we just started in Heroic in Throne, and I see that there is only one other guild that I could even consider transferring to on my server. It's strange- to not have the chance to be part of something outside of my guild orto be able to give that experience (where I was friends with other guilds) to other people anymore because there is nobody outside my raid group.

It's strange, indeed. I have not traded my beloved progression patterns, (OH, and for the record I have never stepped foot in LFR), but they have become bound... Bound to my guild. If they fell apart, then I guess I'd just say I had a good run.

Yeah, total life story thing, but I think that it's a "state of the game" theme going on here and I wanted to try to express along with everybody else, 'cause I see what people are saying.
[Edit]: And by one guild and "nobody else", I mean I don't think there will even be any guilds who do heroics on my server this tier at this rate. I guess nerfs will make that different, but... Yeah, it's a nostalgic gamer perspective, but it's sort of a gloomy thought.

Pretty much believe that as well as it is hard to deny that this content is more difficult than the last two cata tiers and that normals are probably both too difficult and too time consuming for the player that was previously running normals which is a problem.
Heroic raiding is a whole different subject though and has a whole different bunch of issues.

I think Blizzard is going to rethink the raid model, perhaps for the next expansion. I predict normal mode will be made easier, and heroic mode will turn into the equivalent of Challenge Mode 5 mans, with just cosmetic/vanity rewards. The challenge modes in MoP have shown Blizzard there's a market for difficult content that just has such rewards -- GC said the usage was higher than they expected.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
1955 At the first Atoms for Peace meeting in Geneva, Homi Babba predicts that fusion will be in commercial use within two decades.

Pretty much believe that as well as it is hard to deny that this content is more difficult than the last two cata tiers and that normals are probably both too difficult and too time consuming for the player that was previously running normals which is a problem.
Heroic raiding is a whole different subject though and has a whole different bunch of issues.

The thing is I wouldn't have an issue if the last few bosses were hard (as they should be) and there was still enough for the average guild to have a slice of the pie while working on the remainder. I have a problem when the early bosses are a wall for average players. As I said before, when I unsubbed in October my average/casual guild had hit a huge wall on Stone Guard; we managed to get them down once (after like 3 nights of wiping for like 3 hours a night), spent the rest of our time trying out Feng (and learning the fight; this was like week #3 of the expac) and the next week ran into a wall on them again that we could not overcome. People stopped showing up to raid nights. People stopped caring. And the guild imploded.

That's what I'm against. I don't want normal mode to be as stupid easy as LFR where you can ignore everything, but come on. If Stone Guards were closer to the LFR version (by which I mean not have the multiple swaps to keep two from Overloading) and then Elegon was the wall, that's fine since the average guild could have 4/6 bosses in MSV on farm and work on the 5th, so at least every week it's "Okay let's farm our 4 bosses and work progression". Instead it was "We wipe for hours on the first boss, this is going nowhere fast" and people stop playing. In ToT it seems like average guilds can kill the first boss fairly easily but the second boss is a wall. It should be a boss further down that's a wall (hell its 12 bosses normally so 4/8/12 should be the walls) so again an average guild in T15 doesn't run up into the wall immediately and burn out, they can feel like they are accomplishing something. When you can only get down one boss or even zero bosses, you don't feel like you are making ANY progress at all.

That's part of my issue with the game; having heroic mode fights be every fight in the raid totally invalidated normal mode. Normal mode SHOULD be progression, not a stepping stone to the "real" fight (that's what LFR should be for) or a way to tell bad guilds from good guilds (e.g. have you cleared normal mode = good at minimum, still working on normal = bad). The Ulduar-style hard modes were great because they didn't invalidate the normal mode but added in additional perks for doing it on a harder difficulty; that's what it should be so your good/top guilds have all the hard achievements, while your normal guild IS doing progression by clearing normal modes.

So you want normal modes to be a progression path instead of instant-clears? That's fine.

Originally Posted by Arothand

... I have a problem when the early bosses are a wall for average players. As I said before, when I unsubbed in October my average/casual guild had hit a huge wall on Stone Guard; we managed to get them down once (after like 3 nights of wiping for like 3 hours a night), spent the rest of our time trying out Feng (and learning the fight; this was like week #3 of the expac) and the next week ran into a wall on them again that we could not overcome. People stopped showing up to raid nights. People stopped caring. And the guild imploded.

That's what I'm against. I don't want normal mode to be as stupid easy as LFR where you can ignore everything, but come on. If Stone Guards were closer to the LFR version (by which I mean not have the multiple swaps to keep two from Overloading) and then Elegon was the wall, that's fine since the average guild could have 4/6 bosses in MSV on farm and work on the 5th, so at least every week it's "Okay let's farm our 4 bosses and work progression"...

So you want normal modes to be easier/nerfed now, so that people who can't clear them, rather than being "bad" or "exceptionally bad" are now "shit" - that's fine again.

However you can't have it both ways, either you go back to when every boss kill meant something (no normal modes, only heroic modes, with attunements and lower raids), or you make the normal modes easier and thus meaningless and thus people who can't breeze them are even worse of a standard than today.

How many raiders do you think should be able to clear Horridon? Animus? Lei Shen? (normal modes)

I do normal a few times a week on a couple characters, and LFR on alts (or the mains early in the tier / when I need VP).

I really enjoy raiding. While I think LFR is a great feature, it doesn't provide the things about raiding I like best, so I would never do it at the exclusion of normal mode raiding unless I had no other options.

I'm a casual player. I play WoW for fun. There was a time in my life, for a few years there, when raiding every week was pretty fun. It's not anymore. There just is no fun for me in paying $15 a month to be berated, harassed, micromanaged, and every tiniest aspect of my performance controlled and scrutinized harder than it is at my actual job.

It's not a problem with the content, it's not a problem with the game, it's a problem with the people. I don't mind wiping over and over on bosses, I don't mind farming, I don't mind reading and researching and tweaking my setup - but I refuse to play with people who make me bored, frustrated, and angry while I'm doing it, and I refuse to dedicate the few hours of playtime I have left after you factor in work and family to trying to make those kind of people happy.

The raiding is really good, but I don't really appreciate a raid until I have it on farm. It lets me look back and see what they were trying to do with the place. During progression I'm focused on how to maximize myself instead of actually enjoying the raid.